Pudding Monsters Review

Oh, boy. As if my thoughts weren’t already cluttered with bird slingshotting strategies, Hairy spinning tactics, robot/girl lineups or hot dog dropping timing, now I’ve got an all new weird puzzle game to tap and swipe. I was just getting settled down too. Find out what new puzzle game has me fretting again.

Pudding Monsters is a sliding game about merging blobs and geometric rules. What else would you expect from the makers of Cut the Rope? Each board starts out with a few gobs of pudding. You can move a blob horizontally or vertically, but there has to be something to stop it or it’ll zoom off the screen. If two blobs of pudding touch, they form one bigger blob and your goal is to make one giant blob that happens to touch all three stars on the board. Sound easy? If you think so, then this must be your first puzzle game because it’s never that easy.

Let’s start with the basics. Once you join two pudding blobs, there’s no separating them, so you have to figure out your movements ahead of time. You'll be doing a lot of trial and error because you can keep replaying until you get all three stars in each level. Maybe clearing the board with one star will be enough for you, but it’s not for me.

The great thing is there are so many different options, you’re never stuck. You may be swiping all the pudding back and forth, but you’re never stumped with no more possible moves, even if some of those moves are to fling your pudding all the way off the screen. It’s kind of like Sudoku with pudding. Each square of pudding is like a possible number set, while process of elimination and logic tells you which pudding to play.

Then when you’ve mastered your pudding, Pudding Monsters introduces new blobs to throw your game off again. Sticky pudding will leave a trail behind that you can strategically use to stop pudding from sliding. Purple pudding blobs move in unison until they’re joined with other pudding, so you better make sure every purple blob has a place to stop or you’ll lose! Ice blocks will give you one stop before they break, and brick walls can be triggered by sliding a pudding blob onto a button. In many levels, you’ll find your blobs circling the entire board to line up in exactly the right way, and you’ll feel oh so proud when they do.

Pudding Monsters is definitely one of those games where you say, “just one more level,” and then you clear the level, see the next one and want to play that too. The strategy is captivating and the subject is just so weird that you won't be able to sleep until you see what this pudding can do next.

The graphics are great. In the vein of Cut the Rope and Angry Birds, Pudding Monsters looks silly, but rich and colorful so it’s a pleasure to look at. The music could be the score from a Tim Burton movie and the squishy sound effects make the game fun to listen to.

With three worlds of 24 levels each, I can’t wait until they update more. 72 Pudding Monsters levels isn’t enough for me. This could easily become my next obsession if they keep coming up with new pudding powers and different formations to squish ‘em all together. For now, it’s definitely my current obsession if I can just get three stars on that last level!